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"National Geographic" writer to discuss issues facing Amazon tribes

Author and "National Geographic" reporter Scott Wallace will present a lecture titled, "Uncontacted Tribes in the Amazon: The Noose Tightens," at University of the Ozarks at 7 p.m., Wednesday, May 1.

Wallace's lecture will be held in the university's Rogers Conference Center and is sponsored by The Planet Club and the Walton Arts & Ideas Series. The lecture is free and open to the public. Wallace will also do an informal afternoon lecture on May 1 for U of O students on his eight years as a journalist in Central America.

Wallace, who has a feature article in the current April edition of National Geographic called "Peru's Red Gold: Mahogany's Last Stand," will discuss his recent environmental journalism projects in Peru, Ecuador and Brazil, during his visit to the Ozarks campus.

"I will talk about recent developments affecting uncontacted tribes in Ecuador, where reports indicate that Wao tribesmen may have wiped out an entire village of uncontacted Taramenane in a reprisal raid, with the encroachment of the oil frontier provoking the tensions," Wallace said. "In Peru, I will discuss the impacts of illegal logging in areas of isolated tribes, and then I will weave into the lecture the efforts in Brazil to police these remote areas, leading to our expedition."

Author and National Geographic reporter Scott Wallace will present a lecture at Ozarks on May 1 about his recent projects in the Amazon.

Ozarks Associate Professor of Spanish Dr. William Clary has known Wallace for almost 30 years and was instrumental in bringing the author to the U of O campus. Clary will have copies of the April edition of National Geographic for Wallace to sign for attendees following his lecture.

Wallace has written extensively about indigenous people in South America. His most recent book, "The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes" tells the extraordinary tale of a journey into the deepest recesses of the Amazon to track one of the planet's last uncontacted indigenous tribes. The book chronicles Wallace as he follows a 34-man team into the Amazon's uncharted depths, discovering the rainforest's secrets while moving ever closer to a possible encounter with the mysterious flecheiros - or "people of the arrow" - a seldom-glimpsed tribe of deft archers known to defend their lands with showers of deadly arrows before melting back into the forest shadows.

The Washington D.C.-based Wallace is a writer, photographer and broadcast journalist who has covered the environment, indigenous peoples and armed conflicts in some of the world's most remote places over the past three decades.

A graduate of Yale University and the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Wallace has been a frequent contributor to National Geographic as well as a former correspondent for Newsweek and the Guardian. He gained an early reputation for exclusive reporting from the battlefronts of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Panama in the 1980s, where he filed for CBS News Radio, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Newsweek, the Independent and the Guardian. His photography has been featured in Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler, Outside, Details, Interview, Sports Afield, the New York Times, and Newsweek, and his television producing credits include CBS, CNN, Fox News, and the National Geographic Channel.